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A look at 2015: Coopetition will fade, customers will seek vendor-agnostic solutions

John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances –

Joint technology integration and solution selling has greatly benefitted enterprises in the past, as well as the vendors that offered these integrated solutions. Customers could easily vet and purchase system components as holistic converged infrastructure, knowing they’d been designed and tested to work together. In 2014, a number of high-profile joint ventures were dismantled in the enterprise IT space, leaving the industry wondering what will happen next.

Converged offerings benefit customers greatly, as they guarantee that various system components are harmonious and work well together. When the partnering companies abandon the joint model, though, customers are forced to choose between vendors. We all know that competition in the marketplace is healthy because it drives innovation and helps keep costs low, but what about the customers that have built their companies based on these joint ventures? They are left to pick up the pieces.

If you’ve implemented a joint converged infrastructure solution in the past, you’ll face two important questions as those partnerships dissolve:

How do we choose disparate solutions that offer best-in-class technology while continuing to support our system architecture?

How do we continue to align our infrastructure with the overall company goals without compromising infrastructure performance?

If you find that you’re vulnerable to this newfound competition that’s replacing the coopetition you have come to expect, your best action is to find a trustworthy, vendor-agnostic partner to advise you on your next steps. When vendors are no longer focused on providing the best solutions available in partnership, but instead are advocating for the sale of their own product, no one is watching out for the best interests of the customer. Vendor agnosticism eliminates that element of self-promotion and provides peace of mind to customers, who are able to focus on system performance, mission-critical activities and planning for future infrastructure expansion.

The truth is, the sandbox has become crowded and the kids aren’t all playing nicely. Time will tell how this breakup trend will affect the market, as vendors will now start to aggressively tout their own complete “end-to-end” infrastructure sale. However, having a one-vendor solution for an enterprise data center has never been a smart solution, or a practical one for that matter.